On Inauguration Day, he made good on it. He declared “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders — male and female.” The crowd erupted in applause, giving him a standing ovation.

According to the US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, 1.14 per cent of the nation’s adult population, or about three million Americans, identify as transgender. Now, they have been designated as pretenders. US agencies have been told to “cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.”

While the decree will surely be challenged in court, its symbolic import is clear. DEI or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is Enemy Number 1 in America’s culture war. For Trump, transgender rights are the lowest hanging fruit in the tree he wants to chop down. He was more wary of upsetting TikTok users by banning the app than transgender Americans.

That transgender rights have moved centerstage in the culture war is also a marker of how much the world has changed. In 1992, firebrand rightwing Republican Patrick Buchanan gave his famous culture war speech at the Republican National Convention where he tore into the Democratic ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore as the “most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history”. The word “transgender” did not occur in that speech.

However, he said the Democratic convention was filled with 20,000 liberals and radicals dressed up as moderates and centrists — “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history”.

In 2025, Trump would bristle if anyone called him anti-gay but he has effectively deleted transgender Americans from his America. It places America at odds with much of the world. Even India has recognised transgender people legally. But Trump understands that as humans we find the predictability of binary much safer than the non-binary.

A government bureaucracy is all about conformity and putting people in boxes. Transgender, by definition, is something out of the box. The non-binary feels like a scary spectrum of unending possibility.

Yet, once America promised that unending possibility. Your personal freedom was the ultimate promise of the Statue of Liberty. It was the Statute of Liberty, so to speak, and it pulled tens of thousands of people from across the world. It feels no accident that the first South Asian LGBT+ magazine, Trikone, was started by two gay Indian immigrants in California. They had known they were gay in India but they could claim it in America.

I remember reading about it in a magazine in India. I looked at the photograph of Indian gays and lesbians marching in a pride parade in San Francisco in wonder. That freedom to be themselves, free from log kya kahenge, seemed an impossible dream in India at that time. Years later, I walked in such a parade myself in San Francisco with some of the same people in that photograph. And many years after that, I walked in a similar march in Kolkata as cries of azaadi rang out around us. The arc of the moral universe seemed long but, as Dr Martin Luther King Jr had promised, it seemed to bend towards justice.

Yet as Trump has shown, freedom is always a work in progress. It can be won but it can also be rolled back. But it’s also worth questioning our own discomfort with difference, not just Trump’s. Pronoun preferences can feel like a minefield for the unwary. The alphabet accumulation in LGBTQIA+ feels intimidating, too many colours for one rainbow. Cancel culture can create its own backlash as we lose the ability to judge whether a lapse, say in using the correct pronouns, stems from unawareness or malice. 

On the other hand, as the debate over same-sex marriage or adoption has shown in India, governments might be willing to tolerate gay or lesbian identity but refuse to grant it equal rights as the majority. All boxes are not created equal.

The fact is, people who exist outside assigned boxes unnerve us. As a gay man in India, who knew no one like him, hijras and their flagrant display of their difference scared me. I was afraid they had x-ray vision whereby they would somehow discern my secret, the one I tried so hard to keep hidden from the rest of the world. But because they had the courage to be themselves, because they had fought in the trenches and faced police lathis, the court could not pretend they were a minuscule minority whose rights did not matter.

Gay men, especially of privilege, could possibly get away with it, but the court passed over their rights as well. Transgender recognition came through the 2014 NALSA verdict. Gays and Section 377 had to wait till 2018. The gay rights movement owes much to the trans rights movement. Gay rights might be dismissed as a Western aberration but Shikhandi and Ayyappa are part of our mythological DNA.

In the famous story of the Ramayana, Lord Rama asked all men and women to return to Ayodhya. When he returned from exile, he found the hijras, neither men, nor women, sitting outside. He welcomed them to Ayodhya. Trump’s decree will not mean transgenders will disappear but he showed that his New Golden Age for America will be no Ram Rajya.

Source: indianexpress